Baudrillard defined postmodernism as 'the characteristic of a universe where there are no more definitions possible'; a world in which everything has 'been done' and all that remains is to play with the fragments. 'Playing with the pieces - that is postmodern'.

The pieces with which the postmodernist toys are theories, ideas, and vocabularies in which the remnants of the lost modernist belief in the possibilities of progress, liberation, and meaning remain. Postmodernity is 'a game with the vestiges of what has been destroyed. This is why we are "post" - history has stopped, one is in a kind of post-history which is without meaning.'

The pluralist way of dealing with the built-in commitment of words is to think of them all ironically, to engage in a play of mind which ranges over them all with equal nonchalance.

So we hear words like 'beauty' and 'truth' as if they had inverted commas around them. But the play of mind doesn't make available even the possibility of a shared understanding of the object: it's an act of power, not of communication.

The notion of common or shared meaning seems to be in the process of disappearing, and the pastiche of postmodern art and architecture reflects a world in which anything goes.

Any system of cultural meanings can be 'deconstructed' (Derrida) and 'seen through' (Hillman), and we can deconstruct our deconstructions until all semblance of substantiality has dissolved [...] we see the notion of essential substance disappearing from discourse as it has disappeared from physics.

[...] there is plenty of attention given to communication, but rather
less to the notion of what is worth communicating. Substance and
continuity are giving way to process and exchange.

Max: You need me! You need me badly. Because I'm your last contact with human reality. I love you, and that painful, decaying love is the only thing between you and the shrieking nothingness you live the rest of the day.

Diana: Then don't leave me.

Max: It's too late, Diana. There's nothing left in you that I can live with. You're one of Howard's humanoids, and if I stay with you, I'll be destroyed. Like Howard Beale was destroyed. Like Laureen Hobbs was destroyed. Like everything that you and the institution of television touch is destroyed.

You're television incarnate, Diana, indifferent to suffering, insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death - all the same to you as bottles of beer, and the daily business of life is a corrupt comedy. You even shatter the sensations of time and space into split seconds and instant replays.

You're madness, Diana, virulent madness, and everything you touch dies with you. But not me. Not as long as I can feel pleasure and pain and love. (He kisses her farewell.) And it's a happy ending. Wayward husband comes to his senses, returns to his wife with whom he's established a long and sustaining love. Heartless young woman left alone in her arctic desolation. Music up with a swell. Final commercial. And here are a few scenes from next week's show.

I looked back on the past and recalled my people's old ways, but they were not living that way any more. They were traveling the black road, everybody for himself and with little rules of his own [...]

Wilber depicts the mood of modernity as irony, "the bitter aftertaste of
a world that cannot tell the truth about the substantive depth of the
Kosmos...."

Writing more than sixty years earlier, Martin
Heidegger concluded that the mood of modernity is twofold: boredom and
horror. Moderns are bored because the one-dimensional ontology of
mechanistic materialism has emptied humans and things of their
substance; instead of being endowed with a transcendent dimension that
allows things to manifest themselves and thus "be," humans have become
clever animals competing for power and security.

Moderns are horrified
because they surmise the utter meaninglessness of existing in such an
ontologically poverty-stricken world. What Wilber calls the mood of
irony may be how moderns have learned to transmute the grimmer mood of
horror.

What is the clearest and truest thing we can say about the arts in modern societies? Answer: that they offer to one’s attention millions of images, their proliferation such that nobody could respond to them in ten lifetimes. The one clear thing is: they are too many.

[…] fifty years ago it was still possible to say what the official texts of culture were […] We are now required to be equally attentive to the remnants of historical life in every continent, or stand convicted of parochialism. No text is more official than any other: if you think that Greek civilisation is more valuable than Mayan, you have to justify the thought.

I agree with Geoffrey Hartman when he writes, in The Fate of Reading, that ‘the growth of the historical consciousness, its multiplying of disparate models all of which press their claim, amounts to a peculiarly modern burden.’ To be aware of the past, Hartman says, ‘is to be surrounded by abstract potentialities, imperatives that cannot all be heeded, options exhausting the power of choice’.

[…] the notion of play, and - I would now want to add - the even more fashionable notion of indeterminacy in interpretation, are attractive to us, I think, as a strategic answer to the surfeit of cultural images calling for attention.

It is inevitable that we devise several strategies for neutralising the claims a cultural image makes. The proliferation of claims delivered with these images would be intolerable if we couldn’t devise ways of neutralising them.

Indifference is a help, but it is not decent. Indeterminacy is an answer to proliferation; so is play; and so is the habit of voiding claims upon our attention by declaring them all equally arbitrary.

These procedures are feasible because there is no longer a Greek or Roman authority; no imperium. We are free as we move about our imaginary museum. When all else is at risk of failing, we can always reduce the claims of history by declaring history a fiction like any other.

The typical stance of the
contemporary critic is one of irony: he is the one
who knows that we are all
bamboozled; he knows the malice of bourgeois ideology, the spuriousness of
metaphysics, the idiocy of our desire to ground history upon an intentional origin,
whether it is God or a particular concept of man.

Indeed, there are two missing factors
in contemporary criticism.

The first is a set of principles which would renew or
establish a sense of value in what we read and look
at and hear; which would help us
to discriminate between the thousands of objects and events which claim our serious
attention.

The second is the’ conviction from which
such a set of principles would
emerge.

But Morrissey going to number one in 1988 with 'Viva Hate' was very different from the Beatles going to number one in 1965.

Not only are the sales involved much smaller, post-baby boom, post-mainstream, post popular pop. Your granny isn't aware of Morrissey. Morrissey is hardly played on Radio 1 and MTV. Morrissey is, no matter how he may lament the fact, not part of the 'fabric of national life' in the way the Beatles were.

'The fabric of national life' is unchartably complex and can't be encompassed in any single pop style any more. Morrissey is simply the figurehead of a very large cult audience. Pop must learn to accept that it is now doomed to be a related network of unpopular musics.

No wonder poor old Top of the Pops, still clinging to a Reithian, pre-cable notion of One Nation, one 'pop' audience, is in such trouble. How do you show the same studio audience bopping to Mariah Carey and Altern 8? It's ridiculous even to try.

The American flag is now meaningless, just as the 'Union' Jack is. What 'union' can be or should there be between the mutually incomprehensible tribes who now make up Britain?